Russian Communists want to make Lenin hip again—using the power of selfies. Images mixed by Tetyana Lokot.

The art of the selfie photo has become a controversial pastime in Russia, especially after being branded “dangerous” by police, who have called for taking fewer risks and advocated for “safe selfies” with a special campaign. But Russians love their selfies and they keep taking them.

Now Russian Communists are getting in on the action and proposing to hold a federal “Selfie With Lenin” flashmob—a move they say would be a “cheap and effective way to popularize the image of the leader of the world's proletariat among the youth.” In an appeal to Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Russian Communist Party, the Lenin Communist youth union of Russia's Komi republic also stressed the flashmob would help take stock of all the Lenin statues scattered throughout the country. The Komi activists have already tested the idea on a regional level in April 2015.

The idea has merit, especially since it would allow us to see what the state of the Lenin monuments is like. We'll definitely support it. I think Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] will be thankful.

Reacting to the news of the proposed campaign, Nikita Petrov of Memorial, a Russian non-profit historical and civil rights society, called it “domesticating the tyrant” and “an attempt to slide Lenin into the mainstream,” and said it was a desperate move that wouldn't do much for the “Communist regime.”

Lenin selfies are quite a common occurrence on the RuNet already, although most of the photos seem to be taken ironically rather than in honest adoration of Lenin's figure. In June, Russian media reported on a hilarious incident in the town of Prokopyevsk in Kemerovo region, where a drunk resident broke apart a statue of Lenin while trying to pose for a selfie with it.

TJournal trawled Russians’ selfie photos on Instagram and found quite an impressive sampling of selfies with various Lenin statues around the country, usually with the hashtag #селфислениным (#selfiewithlenin).

The RuNet, as it is wont to do, took the joke and ran with it. Users immediately suggested that a selfie campaign was just the first step, and that other possible uses for Lenin and his famous image could include renting him out for parties and weddings, and using the “brand” to further Russia's image abroad (not that it isn't already).

Other commenters pointed out that the campaign was ridiculous and wondered if it was possible to collect all symbols of communism into an amusement park of sorts, in order to remove the offending statues and street signs from everyday life.

Russia currently boasts over 6 thousand Lenin monuments around the country, and other post-Soviet states have their share as well. Notably, Ukraine has seen a number of Lenin statues toppled during the Euromaidan protests and later during the armed conflict with Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine, a phenomenon dubbed Ленинопад (Leninfall). Russia has also seen some toppling attempts: a Lenin statue at St. Petersburg's Finlyandsky train station was left with a large hole through its lower back as the result of an explosion on April Fool's Day in 2009.

Vladimir Putin’s mustachioed spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has tied the knot with his partner of five years, Tatiana Navka. Like Putin’s rumored love interest, Alina Kabaeva, Peskov’s new spouse is a former Olympic champion. This is Peskov’s third marriage, and the couple already has a child, born one year ago.

The wedding, which took place yesterday, on Saturday, August 1, was an extravagant affair hosted at the most expensive hotel in Sochi. According to the news website Gazeta.ru (a Kremlin-friendly publication, incidentally), the rooms at the Rodina Grand Hotel and Spa cost anywhere from 36,000-200,000 rubles ($580-$3,250) a night.

Yesterday, Gazeta.ru also published a rather controversial interview with Peskov’s 17-year-old daughter, Elizaveta, where she expressed ambivalence about her father’s new marriage, and explained her decision not to attend the wedding. At one point in the interview, Peskov’s daughter even said she feels more at home in Paris, where her mother lives, than in Moscow, though her father apparently insists that she remain in Russia to complete her education. “Europe is better adapted to the lives of ordinary people,” she explained, adding, “And I really like the mentality of Europeans my age—their lifestyle. I feel more at home in Europe.”

These revelations are particularly embarrassing for a high-ranking Kremlin official in today’s political climate, when much of the public rhetoric focuses on the West’s moral decadence and the injustice of sanctions over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.

A day after the nuptials, Russia’s most famous anti-corruption activist, Alexey Navalny, has also joined the bandwagon of Peskov-bashing, publishing on his website evidence that Peskov wears a wristwatch worth at least $620,000. The Richard Mille RM 52-01, apparently photographed on Peskov’s arm, while clutching Navka for that fateful “you-may-kiss-the-bride” embrace, is worth four of his annual salaries. According to Peskov’s income and property declarations, he’s received no gifts worth this much money, and his earnings are simply too low to afford such an item.

Photo: Navalny.com.

Navalny points out that his discovery would mean the end of Peskov’s political career, if Russia were a more transparent country. In November 2013, in Poland, for instance, Transport Minister Slovomir Novak was forced to resign after it was revealed that he owned an undeclared wristwatch worth just $3,500—as much as 112 times less than Peskov’s alleged timepiece.

In May 2012, following a protest in Moscow that turned mildly violent, Peskov said “protesters who hurt riot police should have their livers smeared on the asphalt.” Navalny says Russians who oppose corruption should remember Peskov’s threat, and know that it’s directed at them.

Allegedly drunk, scantily clad Russian soldiers from Moscow's largest foreign military base got a shock when partying in the Tajik town of Kulob: a gang of Tajik youth unimpressed with their behaviour soon set on them.

The July 28 brawl that ensued has since spilled onto social media, sparking confrontations between supporters and opponents of the base.

Tajikistan, which would have limited capacity to defend its 1,200 kilometer border with Afghanistan in the event of a serious incursion, looks to Russia for security.

But the base, which houses members of Russia’s 201st Motor Rifle Division, is unpopular with locals, who complain it has caused infrastructural and psychological damage in the area due to live fire military exercises. There have even been cases where livestock have died after being hit by stray bullets, they say.

News of the fray was passed over by Russian media and was only briefly mentioned by pro-Russian media in Tajikistan. Supporters of the base called the reports a “provocation” and appealed for perspective.

US-funded Radio Ozodi came under intense attack for publishing information about the fracas on its Facebook page:

Don’t you consider it important that thanks to this base we are not Afghanistan right now? Before the base our own defensive potential was zero and now we also have nothing to be proud of.

The 201st Russian military base, which currently hosts about 7,500 military personnel across three facilities, is the only Soviet military station that was not nationalized by the host republic after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. During the Tajik civil war between 1992 and 1997, the base continued to operate under the Russian flag. In October 2012 Moscow won a new 30-year term at the base. The Kremlin also has a Space Control System and Okno Space Surveillance System in Tajikistan.

While officially it adopted a neutral stance towards the conflict, many accused the 201st base of providing military assistance to the pro-government faction and effectively bringing incumbent President Emomali Rakhmon to power. Recently, Moscow announced that more than 300 Russian troops were killed during the Tajik civil war — an argument for those who say Russian soldiers were active participants in the conflict.

According to an interstate agreement, Russian soldiers stationed at the base cannot be prosecuted in Tajikistan for any crimes they commit, even those they commit outside the boundaries of the base.

We are kindly asking the Kulob police not to prosecute the local lions who defended our honor and culture and got into a fight with these Russian drunks. Please, free them. Oppositely, those Russians who came half-naked into the centre of the city at midnight should be punished and deported. We live in an independent country and should not be scared of Kremlin or Putin in our decisions.

Another Facebook user concluded that it is his fellow countrymen that are guilty for allowing the soldiers do whatever they want:

It is our own fault. They don't behave like this in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and even in Dagestan. Because they know they will get a response. Even in Afghanistan, where Tajiks live. This is our poor attention to religion. Every real Muslim should defend his honor.

The scenes of hooliganism and violence on July 28 were insignificant in the context of other PR disasters the 201st base has suffered during its time in the country. In 2009 and 2014 respectively, two taxi drivers were allegedly murdered by Russian soldiers. All four murder suspects were surrendered to the Russian side for further prosecution.

Scrooge McDuck, lover of coins, would never have let this happen. Image edited by Kevin Rothrock.

Picture a book that has pages added to it almost every day, though the plot never seems to change. You might as well be reading the story of Russian censorship, which got another update today, when the Kremlin's media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, threatened to block another news website. Officials today told Zuckerberg Pozvonit, or “Zuckerberg Calling,” which focuses on news related to Internet entrepreneurialism, that it must delete or edit within the next three days an article it published about bitcoins. If the website refuses, Roskomnadzor will block it.

The suddenly controversial article, titled “What Are Bitcoins and Who Needs Them?” (available here and archived here), was published more than two years ago in April 2013.

Roskomnadzor's warning is a response to a February 2015 court decision in Astrakhan, which determined that Zuckerberg Pozvonit‘s article contains “the propaganda of tax crimes in the area of legalizing [money laundering] income obtained in a criminal way” and “has a negative impact on the legal consciousness of citizens.”

Roskomnadzor actually resisted enforcing the court order at first, appealing to the court for clarification, arguing that the article in question was merely informational. “The court's decision contains no ambiguity,” the court answered in July. (Copies of both Roskomnadzor's appeal and the court's response are avaialble on Zuckerberg Pozvonit‘s website.)

Vyacheslav Tsyplukhin, who publishes Zuckerberg Pozvonit,stated on Facebook that, according to its editorial policy, ZP media intentionally avoids any political issues. Given this, Tsyplukhin says he is surprised by the court's decision:

We haven't discussed this issue collectively yet, but I maintain the position that we don't have to delete anything. Let them close the website, and then let them explain to our 1.8 million readers, and to the industry, what is going on.

Ironically, two weeks ago, during his visit to a youth summer forum, Vladimir Putin signaled his tacit support for using bitcoins in Russia, stating clearly that the crypto-currency shouldn't be banned. “One can use them,” he told the crowd. “They're spreading to ever more places, these days.”

The Kremlin is officially cracking down on online anonymity. Images mixed by Tetyana Lokot.

Russia is now officially cracking down on anonymizing web services—tools that allow users to access content and websites that might be banned in the country. Roscomnadzor, Russia's Internet censor, has added the anonymizing service NoBlock to its blacklist registry.

The block came after a court in Anapa decreed the service could be used to access content that had earlier been added to the extremist materials list. The court decree from 13 April, 2015, says NoBlock would allow Internet users “to have full access to all banned websites through anonymous browsing and user IP masking.”

The same court in Anapa was quite busy in April, and banned twoother anonymizers, with the respective decrees essentially carbon copies of the one above, but those websites have not yet been added to the Roscomnadzor-managed blocked websites registry. Several other Russian courts, including some in Bashkortostan and Dagestan, have also ruled to block anonymizers, but the court decrees do not reveal the specific addresses of the banned websites.

In May, RosKomSvoboda, a Russian Internet freedom and human rights organization, reported that the very same Anapa city court also ruled to block part of their website on the grounds that the page in question was an anonymizer. In fact, the section of the website owned by RosKomSvoboda only provided instructions on how to bypass geoblocking and access websites blacklisted in Russia.

It's worth noting that in almost all of the rulings, the court cited existing legislation not specific to Internet anonymization services, such as the law on extremism. Still, the fact that the court specified the term “anonymizer” as one of the premises for blocking the websites is cause for concern, since anonymizers, proxy-servers, and other similar tools are not explicitly prohibited in Russia.

Russian officials have debated restrictions on VPNs and anonymizers for quite a while. In 2013 Russian media reported that the Federal Security Service (FSB) was considering lobbying the State Duma with a bill banning “Tor and other anonymizing proxy servers,” but the idea never got out of committee. In February 2015, Leonid Levin, an MP heading the parliamentary committee on information policy and communications, suggested that access to anonymization and circumvention tools such as Tor, VPNs, and proxy-servers needed to be restricted.

In 2014, the Russian Interior Ministry offered almost 4 million rubles (about USD $100,000) to anyone who could devise a way to decrypt data sent over the Tor network. Most recently, in July, Russian media reported that the Kremlin commissioned a study of “possibilities of influencing the development of the Russian segment of the Internet,” that included looking into methods of preventing anonymous activity online and developing ways of regulating and filtering information posted anonymously, analyzing encryption methods, and monitoring encrypted online traffic.

RuNet Echo's own analysis shows that Tor use has been on the uptick in Russia, ostensibly in response to the Kremlin's efforts to regulate or censor content online. Though a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression recognizes encryption software and anonymizing tools as “essential to free speech,” the Kremlin seems to be eager to curtail the use of the software that facilitates anonymity and free expression online.

No Russian TV series for Ukrainians… At least not until TV channels find loopholes in the new law. Images mixed by Anna Poludenko-Young

Ukraine has banned a number of Russian TV shows that it claims glorify the Russian government, military, and law enforcement. However, the new law outlining the rules for banning content has run into resistance from national Ukrainian television channels that are already looking for loopholes in the new legislation.

What has been banned
It has been almost two months since the law banning Russian “propagandist” TV shows in Ukraine came into force. A total of 368 TV series and films that allegedly glorify Russian police and military forces have been banned. This might not seem like a big deal, but in reality, the majority of this “made-in-Russia” programming had occupied prime-time slots on major Ukrainian TV channels.

According to Pylyp Illienko, head of the Ukrainian State Film Agency, a cohort of experts reviewed the movies and TV series previously pre-approved for broadcasting in Ukraine. The content that the experts found to contain “propaganda or humiliation on ethnic grounds” was banned.

The new law prohibits movies, television series, documentaries, and even cartoons that “glorify Russian government,” military, law enforcement and other “punitive agencies of the aggressor state” that in some way “justify or legitimize the occupation of any part of Ukrainian territory.”

However, the sanctions for breaking the new law are hardly unbearable for any of the Ukrainian national channels. If a broadcaster is caught cheating, the fine might vary from $600 to $3150 (13,000 to 68,000 UAH), depending on whether it was a first offence or a repeated violation.

Creativity is everything
The new legislation leaves many loopholes for those willing to get a little creative. For example, according to the new law, movies and TV series made in co-production (by two or more countries) and released before January 1, 2014 do not fall under the ban. So, if a movie has a Ukrainian or any other non-Russian production studio mentioned in the credits, such a product is not subject to the new law. Putting an extra line in the credits is easy, while checking if co-production actually occurred is much more difficult.

Some Ukrainian TV channels have already tried using this loophole for their benefit. “Ukraina,” the national channel with the highest ratings (according to data from June 2015), managed to receive a distribution license from the State Film Agency for the Russian TV series “Traces” (След, a CSI look-alike). The trick was that “Ukraina” presented the content as a series with a new title, “Factual Expert Service: International Criminal Investigation Department,” allegedly produced by the channel's own production company in 2015.

“In reality, this is an old TV series, and the channel just added a few scenes here and there in 2015. The actors playing Russian security services officers were sheep-dipped and changed their uniforms so that no insignia or badges were visible,” said Oleksandr Tkachenko, the CEO of rival “1+1 Media” group at a press conference in Kyiv. “Even the name of the agency was changed. Instead of calling it ‘federal,’ as in the original Russian version, they called it ‘factual.’ They want it to look like some sort of a quasi-security agency, but in essence it is very much a Russian TV series.”

A matter of taste
Such “adaptation” is certainly convenient for many major TV channels in Ukraine, since Ukrainian audiences are quite used to consuming Russian media products. According to the research conducted by the civic group Vidsich, 33% of all the television content on Ukrainian channels is made in Ukraine, 29% in Russia, 33% in other countries, and 5% are older products made during the time of the USSR.

Now that Ukrainian TV channels are faced with having to find a replacement for “made-in-Russia” content, some of them are starting to look at Western markets, while others are looking to Asian products, such as shows from South Korea. Television critics, however, warn that Ukrainian audiences are so accustomed to the Eastern European production values of their favorite shows that new cultural tropes and unfamiliar story lines most likely “won’t work.”

Who knew pro-Russian militants were that into video games? Image by Ben Andreas Harding on Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

On July 22, the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine released what appeared to be a shocking video: a Stinger, an American-made Man-Portable Air-Defense System (MANPADS), was found in the Luhansk Airport. The video shows LNR militants inspecting what looks like a weapons cache, with close-up shots of the various arms and storage boxes with English-language inscriptions on them.

Russian state news agency RIA Novosti published an article on the same day declaring that a number of American weapons had been found at the airport (currently under insurgent control), quoting the Luhansk pro-Russian militants on their unexpected findings.

It would be a scandal of monumental proportions if not for the fact that, as revealed by keen-eyed Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and social media users, none of this was real.

Playing up the scandalous “discovery,” the self-declared republic’s chief investigator Leonid Tkachenko was so outraged he said LNR officials had immediately contacted representatives of the conflict watchdog group Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to inform them of the findings.

As the video started to make the rounds online, many users quickly noticed that the “Stinger” launcher had a few very basic errors—including the English words printed onto its arms.

English test: Which is correct? RE USABLE or RE-USABLE? DATE LOUDED or DATE LOADED? TRACKING RAINER or TRAINER?

Usually, these discoveries would be the final chapter to this story: a ham-fisted attempt to show American “weapons” shipped to help Ukraine, with funny spelling errors. But as gaming blogger Anton Logvinov discovered, there was an extra layer of absurdity to the story, in which life imitated art.

And now the most important thing – do you know, where they got the “Rainer” from? From [the video game] Battlefield 3. That exact image from the game comes up first when you search for “Stinger” on Google image search, coming from IGN [a popular gaming website].
Apparently, DICE [the development agency of Battlefield 3] deliberately distorted the inscription, along with some other details, because they do not have the licenses to use these weapons [in the game].

Though it may not be your very first result on Google Image Search, you will see the aforementioned “RAINER” model of the Stinger come up among the top results.

The crux of the story, as Baudrillard would have been thrilled to conclude, was that the fake Stinger in the LNR video turned out to be modeled after an inaccurate virtual model of the gun. As you could imagine, the discovery led to a deluge of mirth and jokes among Russian and Ukrainian users, underscored, of course, by countless screenshots from video games.

And here is a fighter from a volunteer battalion shooting down an OSCE drone.

But perhaps Battlefield 3 was not the only artistic influence on the fake Stinger launcher. According to one eagle-eyed social media user, the serial number on the found “Stinger” is very similar to the model in another video game, Operation Flashpoint: Red River.

While the incident with the “shocking discovery” of “US weapons” in Luhansk airport is cause for laughter and humorous jibes, it also underscores a more sobering point about the information war: that those fighting for control of the information space are perfectly willing to bend and distort reality to create the appropriate framing for their claims and to sow doubts in the minds of media consumers and Internet users. All that remains for the public, then, is to keep being skeptical, to question what they see, and to think critically when faced with things like virtual guns in “real” videos, themselves a perfect metaphor for information manipulation.

Regulatory Christmas comes early for Twitter in Russia this year. Image edited by Kevin Rothrock.

State officials have announced that Twitter can ignore a new law coming into force on September 1 that will require online services to store all Russian user data on servers located inside Russia. On July 17, Alexander Zharov, the head of Roskomnadzor, the Kremlin’s media watchdog agency, told the press that federal censors don’t consider the kind of user data Twitter collects to qualify as “personal information” under the new data-localization law.

According to Zharov, there are roughly 2.6 million companies in the world that store the kind of user data identified by Russia’s new law. Businesses on this list include AliExpress, Booking.com, Uber, PayPal, Samsung, and Lenovo—all of which have agreed to buy or rent servers inside Russia, Roskomnadzor claims.

Before 2016, officials say they will audit 317 companies to check for compliance. According to Slon.ru’s Petr Birger, Roskonadzor’s audits will be limited to documentation proving that a company has concluded a server-hosting agreement with a domestic Russian provider. (Apparently, there are no physical inspections planned of the server facilities.)

In addition to letting Twitter off the hook, Roskomnadzor says it has no plans to carry out inspections of Facebook or Google, with whose representatives Russian officials say they’re eager to meet again.

In April 2015, the Russian media reported that Google reached an agreement with Rostelecom, one of Russia's leading telecommunications providers, to rent server space in Russia. In April 2015, a Google spokesperson told Global Voices that these reports are “inaccurate,” refusing to elaborate.

Very little is known about Facebook's efforts, or lack thereof, to move Russian user data to Russian servers.

Roskomnadzor’s sudden acquiescence to Twitter is curious, especially in light of the Kremlin’s past efforts to gain access to the service’s user analytics. In fact, the agency’s desperation with Twitter led it in December 2014 to solicit bloggers directly, and rather embarrassingly, for “screenshots” of their analytics data, which Twitter has refused to provide to the Russian government. Moscow’s interest in Twitter has seemed only to grow in recent years. In the latter half of 2014, the Russian government’s requests for various users’ information increased 40 percent, according to a February 2015 transparency report.

Petr Birger suggests that Moscow’s sudden willingness to back off the three Internet giants (Google, Facebook, and Twitter) might be an attempt to make up for the conflicting signals sent by Russia’s recent Internet regulations. For instance, the data-localization law demands that Internet companies make serious investments inside Russia, renting servers and ideally establishing legal representation. A host of other laws, however, like the bans on “suicide propaganda” and “drug propaganda,” mean that Internet companies in Russia today can be singled out, penalized, and even blocked—all for one errant comment left by an anonymous user.

Roskomnadzor’s decision to delay any inspections of Facebook and Google, and its determination that Twitter isn’t affected by the data-localization law, demonstrate that the Kremlin is keeping its options open, while steering clear of any Internet cataclysm that might deprive the country of these ultra-popular services. Moscow, it seems, is betting that American Internet companies will invest in Russia, if they’re given a bit more time, and spared the full brunt of the country's many recent and repressive laws.

Roscomnadzor suggests that the latest block may restrict some Russians’ access to all of YouTube. Images mixed by Tetyana Lokot.

Roscomnadzor, the Russian government's media and Internet watchdog, has issued an official warning to video hosting website YouTube about adding the site to Russia's Internet blacklist for copyright violations. This time, the block could make YouTube completely unavailable to some users.

The video hosting is in trouble with Russia's censors because of unauthorized copies of two Russian TV shows, “Chernobyl” and “Fizruk” (“The PE Teacher”) that have popped up on the website. On April 7, the Moscow city court first ruled that the episodes of the shows were uploaded to YouTube in violation of copyright, and had to be removed. YouTube quickly complied, but Roscomnadzor said new copies of the shows’ episodes have been uploaded since then, and counted a total of 137 such offending videos that were still on the website as of July 20.

Roscomnadzor doesn’t usually warn sites when it adds them to the RuNet blacklist, but made an exception for YouTube in this particular case, seeing as the website is one of the world's most visited. On July 22, in a post on their official website, Roscomnadzor said it was unclear why YouTube wasn't complying with the latest content removal requests, and said it would place the URLs in question on the blacklist on July 27. If the videos were still up three days later, the webpages would be blocked for users inside Russia.

It's worth noting that YouTube pages (including individual videos, user profiles, and channels) have been added to the Russian blacklist registry many times, but in this case Roscomnadzor saw fit to draw attention to the possibility of the website being completely unavailable for some Russian users, ostensibly because of the HTTPS encryption protocol used by YouTube, which prevents some ISPs from filtering traffic.

After three business days, if the unlawful information is not removed, access to these URLs will be restricted by ISPs. This can mean that subscribers of some ISPs will have no access to the entirety of the YouTube service.

Roscomnadzor said it expects YouTube to fully comply with the court order on the matter. When reached for comment by Vedomosti, a representative for Google (which owns YouTube) said they were “looking into the situation” and would issue an official reaction later.

Screencap of the documentary's title sequence. Image from Roman Borisovich on Twitter.

The new hard-hitting exposé From Russia With Cash shows how dirty money from Russia and elsewhere is being laundered through London's high-end real estate market. Since debuting July 8 on Britain's Channel 4, the documentary has already sparked an international campaign to reform U.K. property laws.

In the course of viewing five apartments, ranging in price from approximately $4.5 to $23.5 million, the couple meets with a series of real estate agents from top London firms, and secretly records the encounters.

At each showing, “Nastya” first pretends to fall in love with the space. Next, “Boris” pulls the estate agent aside to say that he would like to purchase the property, but needs the deal to proceed anonymously. Boris explains that he will be buying the property with money pilfered from the state budget and doesn't want anyone in Moscow connecting a hole in the budget with the purchase. “Every [Health Ministry] contract brings a little bit to my pocket,” Boris tells each estate agent, following the planned script. “Needless to say, the money for this flat comes out of the government budget. [Therefore] discretion is the absolute priority.”

In every instance filmed, the estate agents appear willing to continue with the sales, which could net them commissions ranging from $100,000 to $500,000. Some of the agents even recommend law firms that specialize in hiding a buyer's identity and coach “Boris” on how to avoid potential legal problems. In the U.K., estate agents are required by law to submit “suspicious activity reports” to the National Crime Agency if they have concerns that the money being used to purchase properties might have been obtained through criminal means.

British journalist Ben Judah, one of the people behind the film, spoke to RuNet Echo about the project. “I came up with the idea for [From Russia With Cash] on a London night bus with producer Tom Costello. We were sadly not surprised [to find not even one clean estate agent]: we'd been researching money laundering in London property for months. With at least £57 billion ($88.7 billion) worth of money laundering taking place in London and the U.K. a year—or 3.6% of GDP—dusty Victorian bricks have become the reserve currency of global corruption.”

Chido Dunn of the anticorruption group Global Witness explains the logic of money laundering through upmarket property. “Stolen billions don’t fit under mattresses—people only steal them if there is somewhere safe to put them and the U.K.’s property market is providing that safe haven,” says Dunn in the film. “London is, in effect, the money-laundering capital of the world.” Global Witness has previously called attention to this issue, such as in the report Blood Red Carpet. It highlights the case of a $5.5 million Surrey mansion believed to be owned by a former Kyrgyz President's son, who was convicted of corruption and the attempted murder of a U.K. citizen after fleeing his homeland in 2010.

As intended by its creators, From Russia With Cash has generated a lot of discussion about how London is enabling corruption around the world, and has also helped launch a campaign to reform U.K. property laws. After the initial airing of the documentary, the hashtag #FromRussiaWithCash became a trending topic on Twitter. An Early Day Motion (EDM) inspired by the film has been introduced in Britain's lower house of Parliament. An EDM is a formal motion that Parliament members can table to draw attention to a cause. 30 MPs have already signed on to EDM 275:

Early day motion 275: MONEY LAUNDERING THROUGH LONDON PROPERTY MARKET

That this House notes the recent screening of From Russia with Cash on Channel 4; expresses its concern that the proceeds of corruption are being laundered through the London property market via the use of anonymous offshore companies; and recommends that corporate transparency become a Land Registry requirement so that any foreign company intending to hold a property title in the UK is held to the same standards of transparency required of UK registered companies, so preventing London or other locations from becoming a safe haven for the corrupt.

Russians have also joined the campaign to clean up London's property market, and, by doing so, address corruption in Russia itself. Opposition politician Alexey Navalny published an online appeal calling on Russians to tweet at British Parliament members, urging them to support EDM 275. In the post, Navalny's anti-corruption team also highlights two anonymously owned, multi-million dollar London apartments, which they say belong to the sons of two powerful members of President Putin's inner circle, Vladimir Yakunin and Boris Rotenberg.

It will be very useful if you write several polite tweets to British Parliament members. Like these.

“We were delighted that Navalny joined the campaign,” Ben Judah told RuNet Echo. “One of the most effective tools a campaigner has at his disposal is shaming—and having an icon of the Russian opposition tweeting at British MPs that there are ‘Blood Mansions’ in their constituencies is a super-effective tool. The MPs tweeted at by him are unlikely to forget it. We think it works as every little nudge like that cements the idea in the MPs’ heads this is a live issue. It's a blunt way to illustrate to them money laundering is making many Russians angry at London's role in the corruption ‘looting-machine.'”

Judah said the makers of the documentary were keen to “keep up the activism” and push a set of targeted policy recommendations that they developed in collaboration with Global Witness and Transparency International. “Our one key objective is to end the ability to anonymously buy UK property: a device that allows budget-plunderers in Krasnoyarsk and Donetsk to turn their dirty black cash into pretty white assets in London stucco,” Judah said. He added that British Prime Minister David Cameron's aides have seen the policy proposal and are now considering it.

Dmitry Kiselyov declares war on Facebook and Instagram. Image edited by Kevin Rothrock.

This past weekend, Russian news anchor Dmitry Kiselyov, famous for his vociferously pro-Kremlin punditry, was uncommonly active online. He started with launching his own page on Facebook, in order “to be with those who want to know more.” After registering, Kiselyov wrote his first post, expressing readiness to to discuss everything from “radioactive dust” to “the severities of being LGBT” (referring to infamous comments he’s made in the past about Russia’s ability to visit nuclear destruction on the United States and the need to burn and bury the organs of gays who die in car accidents). Kiselyov’s account was online for all of four hours, before it disappeared without any explanation.

At first, the public largely assumed that Kiselyov had deleted the account himself, after receiving hundreds of insulting comments. According to him, however, it was the website’s moderators who deleted the page. “Facebook keeps practicing selective political correctness,” Kiselyov wrote on Vkontakte, Russia’s leading online social network, where he quickly created another account. “But I'm in the network already,” he added, “and I'm not going to leave this space so easily.”

Russian photographer and liberal blogger Rustem Adagamov, who helped draw attention to Kiselyov’s Facebook scandal, supposed that the website might actually have blocked the account. (Adagamov has faced his own problems with censorship on Facebook.)

Apparently, moderators closed Kiselyov’s [Facebook], based on complaints about it being fake. So, the Jedi will return, I guess :-)

As it turns out, the Jedi has returned. Kiselyov's Facebook page is once again accessible, though he’s already sworn not to use the foreign network, having opted for Russia’s homegrown services, after the bad treatment.

Kiselyov's problems extend to Instagram, as well, where his account hosts just two photographs, 169 subscribers, and dozens of hateful comments. Why his Instagram account was blocked is even less clear, as users banned or suspended on Facebook aren’t usually blocked on this service also.

Meanwhile, on Vkontakte, Kiselyov has managed to attract more than 17,500 subscribers, and the number is still growing. Kiselyov undoubtedly owes some of his online popularity to his television celebrity, but the hysteria in the media surrounding his arrival at Vkontakte suggests that his social media misadventures were perhaps a scheme to excite the public and convert some users back to Russia’s number one network.

The administrators at Vkontakte wasted no time verifying Kiselyov’s account, and he promptly uploaded a video selfie, proving that the account belongs to him personally. Unlike his accounts on Facebook and Instagram, where the user base is generally more Western-leaning and liberal, Kiselyov’s readers on Vkontakte have left mostly positive comments, as well as obsequious questions (see below). Kiselyov says there’s nobody but him running his Vkontakte page.

Один вопрос: чей Крым?Ответ: Крым наш.

There is only one question: whose land is Crimea?Answer: Crimea is ours.

Kiselyov’s problems on Facebook and Instagram have even attracted the attention of various public officials and lawmakers. Alexander Brod, a member of the presidential council on human rights, says censorship like this should be treated as a violation of free speech.

Duma deputy Alexander Yuschenko warned that Facebook has become “a political network for coordinating various forces who work to destabilize and stir up trouble.” Yuschenko told the newspaper Izvestia that the near instantaneousness with which Facebook blocked Kiselyov indicates that the website set out to “demonize” him in advance.

Given the apparent orchestration of Kiselyov’s exit from Facebook and warm welcome at Vkontakte, Yuschenko isn’t the only one with questions about who planned what in advance of this curious fiasco.

The Telegram messaging app has been blocked in China amid accusations of allegedly aiding Chinese human-rights lawyers in their everyday work and organizing. The block follows a massive cyber attack against the company’s Asia-Pacific servers earlier this month.

Hong Kong Free Press first reported the block on July 13. According to blockedinchina.net, access to Telegram’s web-version has been blocked from servers located in Beijing, Shenzhen, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and Yunnan provinces in China.

Screenshot from blockedinchina.net from July 20, showing the Telegram web interface block in China.

On July 12, Chinese state-run newspaper People's Daily published an article accusing Telegram of aiding human-rights lawyers and advocates, who allegedly used the app and its “Secret Chat” mode (which allows messages to self-destruct after a period of time) to engage in “attacks on the [Communist] Party and government.” These accusations are the latest in a series of attacks on human rights advocates in China, with 23 individuals already arrested, and over a 100 others facing pressure from the state. Some human rights lawyers, like Pu Zhiqiang, have also faced persecution for their messages on Chinese microblogging website Weibo.

Telegram, run by a Berlin-based non-profit, was founded by Russian Internet entrepreneur Pavel Durov, who is also the founder of Russia's biggest social network, VK (often dubbed “Russia's Facebook”). After facing pressure from the Kremlin to share personal data about the VK community organizers of Euromaidan groups and to shut down a Russian anti-corruption group, among other things, Durov sold his share of VK, was forced out of a leading role in the company, and left Russia in search of new beginnings.

On July 10, Telegram reported a massive DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack on its Asia-Pacific servers. Founder Pavel Durov wrote about the cyber attack on Twitter.

In a blog post on its official site, Telegram speculated the attack could have been initiated by its Korean competitors, Kakao Talk and Line, whose users moved to Telegram en masse in 2014 because of censorship.

By now we know that the attack is being coordinated from East Asia.

We've noticed a three-fold increase in signups from South Korea in the last two weeks. The last time we were hit by a massive DDoS was in late September, 2014, in the wake of the South Korean privacy scandal when signups from that country spiked as well.

We've also heard that some companies are unhappy with our new platform that allows artists to create free custom stickers for the users. Two weeks after its launch we were hit by a lesser DDoS, also aimed specifically at the Asia Pacific cluster.

While there has been online speculation that the Chinese government could also be responsible for the DDoS attack, Telegram has not offered any official versions about the source of the attack, but did say it came from South-East Asia.

@xoclate@telegram We're on it 24 hours a day. Managed to be online for 95% of users. The attack is coming and is coordinated from SE Asia.

When asked about reports of the China block, Durov told TechCrunch that he didn't think Telegram was “completely blocked in China,” but said the traffic from the region had decreased. “[But] if we do get completely blocked in China, we’re not going to play cat and mouse with their government at this stage. Let them block,” Durov reportedly said.

Durov's native Russia has also been considering a crack-down of sorts on messenger apps like Telegram. In July, Ivan Tavrin, the president of MegaFon, Russia’s third largest telecom operator, asked the Russian government to consider introducing new regulations for the messaging services WhatsApp, Viber, and Skype. Apart from the apps being in competition with traditional SMS services offered by telecom providers, Tavrin took issue with the security of the messengers, claiming they put dangerous power in the hands of terrorists and spammers.

Two of these men died hours after this photo was taken in a Russian barracks that partially collapsed. Photo from Sergei Filatov's social media page, via Elena Rykovtseva. Facebook.

Almost two dozen Russian soldiers died on July 13, when part of a military barracks in Omsk suddenly collapsed. The men who perished in the tragedy were as young as 18, and not a soul among them was born before 1991. Speaking through his press secretary, President Putin conveyed his condolences to the families of those who died and promised medical aid to the 19 survivors.

On Russian television, however, the incident passed relatively unnoticed. In the days after the accident, the men who died were laid to rest throughout the country in funerals held in their hometowns. The burials did not make the evening news.

On July 15, in a Facebook post that has been shared more than 12,400 times and “liked” more than 16,000 times, RFE/RL’s Elena Rykovtseva wrote a scathing attack against the Russian television news media, faulting the national networks for ignoring the human side of the tragedy. Given the text’s great popularity and how profoundly it seems to resonate with Russian Internet users, RuNet Echo offers the following English-language translation of Rykovtseva’s post.

THEIR NAMES HAVEN’T BEEN MENTIONED ONCE ON ANY OF THE NATIONAL TV NETWORKS

R.Shaihulin, October 5, 1994

B.Sudnikovich, January 4, 1995

A.Polegenko, January 17, 1997

R.Yumagulov, March 29, 1991

M.Ignatenko, January 20, 1996

R.Filyanin, July 24, 1996

M.Ivanov, October 22, 1996

V.Chemezov, October 19, 1996

S.Vahrushev

Filatov, August 18, 1996

R.Altynbaev, June 14, 1994

D.Kenih, November 16, 1996

A.Gritskov, January 30, 1996

E.Belov, December 3, 1995

B.Nafikov, 21.09.1996

O.Kortusov, March 16, 1996

A.Shokaev, November 5, 1994

E.Herman, July 30, 1995

F.Mamliev, September 2, 1996

E.Reshetnikov, September 30, 1996

AM.Igoshev, April 6, 1996

A.Shingareev, April 24, 1997

V.Lomaev, January 29, 1997

Five of them were buried today in Omsk. Another two went into the ground in Novosibirsk. They’ve declared a day of mourning in Orenburg, too. The dead are also arriving in Irkutsk, Bashkiria, and St. Petersburg. People are crying across the whole country, but it’s no longer an issue for the national TV networks. “[Ukrainian nationalist group] Pravyi Sektor is marching on Europe. The Ukrainian authorities can’t manage the radicals.” This is how their goddamn news broadcasts begin. And there’s not a word about our dead boys.

At this moment, there are funerals happening in Omsk—already for the second day in a row. But there’s no news coming out of there. Not a single live broadcast. And I remember well how Rossiya-24 aired around-the-clock coverage of Lugansk separatist [Alexey] Mozgovoi’s funeral. I remember how it went on endlessly, as the mic was handed off to family, then friends, and then locals, and how everyone cried in their speeches about what a great and wonderful patron and protector he was. When it comes to our own boys in the Russian army, who incidentally wanted fanatically to serve as paratroopers, there’s not a thing on television. Nobody broadcasts the reactions, or the condolences of a single living mourner—apart from Putin’s sympathy, as retold by [his press secretary Dmitry] Peskov. And this was only on the first day.

Yesterday, on the second day, now speaking before a group of students in Klyazma, [Putin] no longer remembered these other young men. He smiled and he beamed and he congratulated the crowd on the day’s fine weather. It was as if the Omsk barracks never happened. The victims’ names were never read on a single national TV network. The men are nameless—all 23 of them.

It’s nothing personal, guys.

But each of these boys has his own social media page, and there are photographs. And it would have been possible at least to say something—anything—about these men, and about their families. Something about Oleg Kortusov, for instance, who was a promising fighter and whose fiancée is expecting a child. Or something about Egor German, another local from Omsk, who leaves behind a baby born less than a year ago.

And this is to say nothing about helping the victims’ loved ones—those close to the men who died and who survived. They transferred another Omsk soldier, Volodya Petrov, to Moscow, and the Defense Ministry is paying for his treatment, but they didn’t allocate any money to his family for their train transportation or accommodations in the city. And his mother has nothing. That’s why the city of Omsk banded together and raised money to help her.

For some reason, they don’t want to talk about this on their national TV networks, with their audience of millions. For some reason, they don’t want to say even one human thing about these guys, or ask the country if maybe it, too, would like to offer some help, in addition to the one-time assistance their families received from the state (which they don’t get right away, incidentally)?

But I don’t want to talk about these people and their TV stations anymore. Let them live with their shame. I just want to tell those boys goodbye. And also in their memory, I want to publish this photograph [see above], which I found on the social media page of one of them, Sergei Filatov. He’s the one second in from the right in the last row in the back. In the front is Valery Lomaev from St. Petersburg. He died, too. The photo is from July 12, a few hours before the tragedy, inside the very same barracks.

The law, signed by Putin, allows users to request that search engines remove links to information about them. Images mixed by Tetyana Lokot.

President Vladimir Putin has signed into law the “right to be forgotten” legislation that makes it possible for individuals to force Internet search engines to delete links to certain kinds of information about them.

According to the law, content links to which should be removed upon a user's request includes false information about the individual’s life, or information that has “become outdated due to later events or actions of the individual.”

The law remains quite vague about the criteria for this kind of information, but The RuNet reports that those filing complaints will have to prove the information has become “outdated”: for instance, a civil servant can ask to remove links about their work only if they no longer hold the post in question and can provide documents proving they left the state service.

The law does not apply to information about criminal activity, in cases where the statute of limitations has not expired.

The law stipulates that search engines must review removal requests over the course of 10 days. Failing to respond to a user's takedown request can lead to court proceedings and, if the court finds that a search engine refused a legitimate request, to fines.

The “right to be forgotten” law, which comes into force on January 1, 2016, has attracted a fair amount of criticism from Russia’s Internet industry, with Yandex, Russia’s biggest search engine, claiming that the law violates Russians’ constitutional right to access to information.

Curiously, on July 14, the same day he signed the “right to be forgotten” law, Vladimir Putin came out in favor of “minimal restrictions” of the Internet. Speaking at a youth IT-forum in the “Territory of Meanings” summer camp in Russia, he said any laws regulating the Internet should be introduced “only to protect public interests as a whole,” and stressed that the Kremlin was not planning to introduce “any other restrictions” apart from the ones already in place. At the same time, Putin said he sees “anarchy and complete anonymity” as the biggest threats posed by the Internet.

St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University's school logo. Edited by Kevin Rothrock.

The St. Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University has dissolved a medical board legally charged with granting permission for sex-change operations to patients over 21 years old, and apparently fired Dmitry Isaev, the doctor who headed the commission. Isaev, a noted scholar who headed the school’s department of clinical psychology, came under attack by an anti-gay group known as Moscow Is Not Sodom and St. Petersburg Is Not Gommorah! after granting an interview to the LGBT youth community Children-404.

On May 14, Isaev participated in an ask-me-anything style interview with Lena Klimova’s LGBT youth group Children-404, where he answered different questions about issues ranging from Russian laws cracking down on the LGBT community to best parenting practices when a child is gay.

Two weeks later, Moscow Is Not Sodom organized a letter-writing campaign against Isaev, accusing him of being a mentally ill former criminal, claiming that he “almost never” rejects requests by supposed transgender individuals for sex changes, unlike “traditional psychiatrists in this position.” The group encouraged followers to send complaints to the St. Petersburg district attorney’s office, asking police to review his work as a teacher and as head of the medical board granting permission for sex changes.

On July 10, rumors started spreading online that the university had buckled under the pressure of the anti-gay campaign, firing Isaev and disbanding the commission. On July 16, Isaev confirmed to the media that his tenure at the university has ended, though he declined to elaborate on the reasons, citing the school’s wishes. In the past, Isaev indicated that the university’s management struggled to respond to the influx of complaints and phone calls.

This was not the first time Isaev granted an interview to Children-404. More than twoyears ago, he spoke at length to the group, criticizing Russia’s rising culture of “intolerance” and generally retrograde understanding of the LGBT community. Isaev also stressed that homosexuality and other sexual orientations are naturally occurring and not to be dismissed as lifestyle choices.

Writing on VKontakte, Russia’s most popular online social network, Children-404 founder Lena Klimova lamented Isaev’s dismissal, saying, “I thought this would be impossible. It turns out that no one is safe.”